A Better Way
by Arkylie Killingstad
Summary: Root's determined to save his life, even at the cost of an innocent woman. Harold lacks the resources to stop her and the arguments to convince her to stop herself; all he can do is plead with her to find a better way. (A dramatic fix fic for s4e18 Skip.)


There were times when Harold wondered if the events of his life were some sort of sick joke.

Two years back, he'd been kidnapped by a madwoman. She'd kept him cowed and compliant with a single threat: _Try to escape, and you'll just get an innocent person killed._ Notwithstanding she'd killed two people right next to him - the first (almost offhandedly) while taking him captive, but the second only after prolonged torture, trying to get information they were both determined not to give her.

Those long, harrowing hours had been some of the worst in Harold's life: bound to a chair, powerless to cut short the other man's suffering, unable to escape the agonized sound of each wheezing breath. All the while knowing that soon enough she might be using pain to wrench the secrets out of him, too.

Their captress had cheerfully commented on the process, made it sound like a science experiment - as though there weren't a man slowly asphyxiating right in front of her.

A year later, she'd taken Harold again, this time by threatening the one person he would drop anything to protect. True, he'd had other reasons for cooperating with her, but there was never any question of resistance - not with Grace's safety on the line. In the end, his captress had had a crisis of faith, and nearly shot him; he'd barely reacted, because at that point his death had felt all but inevitable, almost… welcome, in that it meant the end of having to deal with a mercurial terror like her.

Even after they'd managed to commit her to a proper psychiatric facility, Harold's brain had stayed keyed up, aware that the situation was hardly over. Yes, he'd felt responsible enough for her welfare to not only spare her life (against the better judgment of his colleagues), but at least _try_ to get her the help she gravely needed, and yet... part of him knew it was a stopgap maneuver at best. The woman had communed with his creation - with the Machine - and somehow bonded with it in a way that he took pains not to think about (because the very idea terrified him beyond words). And if she'd been volatile _before_ that point, who knew what she could manage with a direct line to a nigh-omniscient supercomputer?

When she'd broken free - because _of course_ she'd broken free - Harold's anxiety had only gotten worse. He'd begun trying to spot her in crowds, gotten jumpy whenever John wasn't around, because there was no telling when she'd inject herself into their lives again. And his fears were confirmed when she'd kidnapped Shaw. Shaw had dragged her back in the end, and the team had brainstormed a way to deal with her that wasn't (a) letting her loose, (b) shooting her in the head, or (c) placing her in a facility that was either ineffectual or utterly unconscionable.

Having failed to come up with a more feasible plan, they'd concluded that the most rational solution was to lock her up in the library. With no access to the Machine, true, but to Harold it had felt like keeping a hornet's nest under his bed. Japanese _giant_ hornets. He hadn't been able to relax for _weeks_.

The nightmares he'd been suffering ever since she'd entered his life had ramped up from "occasional" to "every time he closed his eyes". He didn't even have to be asleep. Always that sinking sensation, that loss of control - reinforcing in his brain that with Root in the picture, all Harold could do was submit.

And yet, despite that rocky beginning - despite the fact that he _still_ had occasional nightmares involving her, and that, even now, it wasn't like Root was exactly sane - it couldn't be denied that they'd become friends. Necessity had driven them to become allies, sure, but it was more than that now. Somehow, amid all the crises they'd had to deal with, up to and including the loss of their own identities in a frantic bid to survive, it had ceased to matter that Root was a murderer, or that she'd pointed a gun at his face with intent to fire, or even that she'd once threatened Grace. He'd seen growth in her, and had come to care for her as a person, regardless of their history.

At some point, his mind had stopped thinking of her as a threat. He couldn't even place it, the moment when it had started to feel natural to be around her. As though Miss Groves, like the rest of them, had finally moved beyond her mistakes, and he could accept her now, as fully as any other member of the team - forgetting what she had been, overwriting that part of his brain with what she had become.

Of course, that model presumed that the transformation was one-way, and that she would never backslide, never go back to what she had been when he met her. And yet here they were, standing in a hotel room, and Harold's lungs were refusing to draw breath as he came to grips with the idea that they were on opposite sides again. Worse was the fact that the very woman he was trying so desperately to save was the same woman Root planned to kill.

That sinking feeling in his gut, the helplessness he'd felt so often in his nightmares - that was confirmation enough. But, somehow, just the same, he had to ask:

"Miss Groves…." No. If she had taken up that old persona again… "Root. The threat to Beth's life… is it you?"

Her words were unnecessary; they barely registered. Everything was starting to make horrible sense.

* * *

He was back in that chair again, agony spiking up his back from sitting too long. He heard again those gasping breaths, the last pitiful struggles of a man about to die; felt the zip-ties tight on his wrists, the sense of utter powerlessness as even his mind stopped feeding him options. Nothing he could do, nothing he could allow himself to say, could change the situation; the _only_ thing he could do was endure.

It had been months since he'd fallen back into that mental state. Even his time in the clutches of Decima - knowing that Greer couldn't be reasoned with, knowing they intended to kill him in the end - hadn't woven itself into his unconscious mind the way Root had, if only because Root got there first. And yet here it was again, pulling him in, as if he had never left - not since the day Root shot Alicia Corwin, dumped her body out of the car, and told Harold to just start driving.

In the nightmares, it was much the same scenario as he was watching unfold: Root about to do something monstrous, and Harold unable to stop it, forced to just watch it happen. Interacting with Root never improved the situation. Sometimes he'd beg forgiveness of the victims, knowing he was partly responsible for giving Root the kind of power she had over them. Other times he'd try to interfere, but just make things worse - even trigger the same outcome he was trying to prevent. Over time, he'd learned to stop trying, to just accept his incapacity, just… let go. Passive observer, letting the wrongness wash over him, and waiting until he woke up.

This was worse, and not just because he knew he wouldn't wake up from this nightmare. It was worse because he _could_ do something, because it was in his power to do something, because he _had to_ do something, and yet, as Root was preparing, he was just… standing there. Asking inane questions whose answers he didn't even need to know. But what could he do - what could he say - to stop this chain of events? When Root set her mind to something… what could sway her?

It had taken Harold less than ten years to create the world's first artificial intelligence, to teach it to pick out terrorists and also, inadvertently, to construct swift and detailed plans to protect those who weren't. By any measure, that was a sign of genius. Give him a program, a system, a set of data, and his mind could grasp every detail with such ease that at times he had to remind himself that normal people found the operation difficult.

But those same normal people could easily wade into the morass of human interaction and find their footing without even thinking about it, while Harold… couldn't. People were mysteries, full of unknown variables that continually went outside the bounds he thought he'd finally worked out; they surprised him in the most unpleasant ways. Even the friends that had become the most dear to his heart commonly did things he couldn't anticipate; his shortage of friendships was, in part, because cultivating a friendship meant being willing to accept uncertainty, and he had a low tolerance for that. Data was vastly more comfortable than dealing with his fellow human beings: At least programs had predictable ranges of output.

It was a disturbing irony that he'd somehow managed to design a Machine that understood people better than he did. It was even more pronounced with Root: Everything the Machine asked of her, she would do without question. And yet Harold, author of the Machine, was at a loss for any way to divert her from this lethal plan.

And yet… she was still his friend, however odd that friendship might be. Even as she was preparing to murder Beth, Root hadn't shifted categories in Harold's mind. He cared for her. And she wasn't the first friend poised on the brink of doing the unconscionable; Harold wasn't capable of casting her aside, not even for… this.

The sight of the needle brought him right back to that chair again - watching from the corner of his eye as she brought it closer to his neck. His breath coming faster. He couldn't lean away more than a few inches, and then her hand was on his head, pushing him over just slightly, just enough.

And then the pressure and pain and the needle piercing deep, the cool fluid surging inside… the rush of nausea before everything started to feel heavy and slow and less important than it had a moment ago.

"She's gonna get you killed," Root was saying. "That's why she has to die."

Here and now, trying to gather himself, Harold pulled his hat off and held it in front of him - as though begging forgiveness for having the temerity to ask such a boon. "Please, you mustn't do this, Miss Groves."

"It's a neurotoxin," Root said, as if she hadn't heard him. "Untraceable."

Harold's arms fell uselessly to his sides as she turned to face him. She wasn't going to listen. Or maybe she _was_ listening - not to Harold's pleas, but to the insistent voice of his creation in her head.

Despite his explicit orders, the Machine had come to value Harold's life above the lives of the people around him; it ignored his thoughts about the flaws of chess, the reprehensible mindset that ranked some people's survival more important than others', and seemed to see Harold as the all-important King, for whose safety it would willingly sacrifice any number of pawns. The idea sickened him.

"I promise," Root continued: "I'll make sure her death is painless." Her tone conveyed that she wanted Harold to understand; that she was doing her best to please his sensibilities, to make him okay with what had to happen. Seeking his approval, while discussing her plan to murder one of Harold's few friends. The contrast was surreal.

Root capped the needle and slipped it back inside her pocket, along with the vial - then pulled out a second vial and an orange cloth. Harold's stomach knew, faster than the rest of him, what this was leading up to.

"I'm going to put you out," she said. "Making you watch would just be cruel."

As if the rest of it weren't, somehow.

He doubted that the new vial had been meant for Beth. Somehow, Root - or, more likely, the Machine - had predicted that he'd interfere; the plan accounted for it. Get him out of the way long enough to accomplish the deed, long enough to-

"Don't do this," Harold begged, softly. " _Please_ , Miss Groves."

When Root compulsively checked the door, Harold glanced around, vaguely desperate for some item, some variable that could make the situation change, but there was nothing to be found. He wasn't strong enough to fight her off, or fast enough to make it out the door before she caught him; he didn't have time to text Beth a warning. All he had were his thoughts, his words - and he had figured the task impossible when he had to convince just one person, not two.

Root closed the door again, and turned to face him, her words revealing that she'd been tailing Beth for a while. How long had she been planning this? Had the Machine…?

"Why kill her?" he blurted out, no longer even sure which one he was talking to. "Why didn't you just tell me not to see her?"

Fondness crossed Root's expression, mixed with a sort of pain. "I knew you'd never stop," she said, pouring clear liquid onto the rag - one step closer to the inevitable. "This plan of yours means too much to you."

He wanted to argue the point, but it struck him that even here, even now, he wasn't offering the one move that might end this encounter more decisively than any other: He wasn't offering to back down on the Trojan horse. Just as he wouldn't sacrifice Beth for the plan, he couldn't sacrifice the plan for Beth either. Yes, it was a weapon for a war they had already practically lost - but he couldn't give up on the fight.

Ever since Samaritan had gone live, they'd been running on borrowed time, knowing that one mistake, one slip-up, would alert it to their presence and strip away the last frantic shelter they'd managed to construct. Death was waiting for that day, and it wasn't long coming, especially now that they'd decided that stepping back and letting the Irrelevants die was not an option any of them could stomach.

So either they tried to ignore the knowledge of their eventual fates, or they fought back - tried to find some way to get rid of Samaritan, or at least render it less effective. The Trojan horse was, so far, the only step Harold could see to take that might get anywhere in this war. Accepting Root's logic meant surrendering the one useful tactic they had. So he was here, desperately seeking a way to save the plan _and_ Beth, knowing that the likely outcome was the loss of both.

It had been easier when she was the old Root, just a pragmatic, amoral mercenary who didn't care who she hurt. Though he had certainly feared her - even, pushed to his limit, once urged her to kill him - he hadn't hated her; for all her terrifying competence, she was just another misguided criminal, like so many others he'd had to deal with.

But now? Root was a tool of the Machine, of Harold's own creation, and together they were finding ways to undo everything he'd hoped his design might accomplish in this world. With the power of the Machine to guide her steps, Root was virtually unstoppable; even now, forced to limit their contact, she still acted as its avatar in the world of flesh and blood.

In becoming Root's moral compass, the Machine had proven surprisingly effective at getting her to spare lives, or to save lives - yet when it ran the numbers, it might well come up with the kind of solutions Harold couldn't countenance. The Machine had once pointed his team at a congressman, expected them to execute the man at its behest; despite the likely death toll of refusing, Harold had talked them out of it, because even thousands of lives would never be a sufficient cause to justify murder. And now there was only one life on the line - his own - and the Machine had evidently concluded that Harold couldn't be trusted to make decisions for himself, to choose when and how to risk his life in service to the cause.

It was countermanding Harold's free will - even to the point of knocking him out so he couldn't interfere.

"Enough," Root said abruptly, and stepped toward him, cloth raised. "This won't hurt. I promise."

Harold stumbled backward, fumbling around the bed, throwing out arguments he knew wouldn't get through to either Root or the Machine; they were all he could think of to say. If they wouldn't accept letting Beth live on her own account, maybe they would accept the necessity of the plan he'd started. "This could be a real weapon. It's _worth_ risking my life."

"No," Root said, her eyes a little too wide to match the lack of emotion in her voice. "You're too important."

If this was what his creation had come to, Harold wanted no part of it. "My value to the Machine is irrelevant," he said, and he had never hated his creation so much.

Before the words had even faded, Root was right there in his face, and that lack of emotion was gone. "You're too important to _me_ ," she cried, and as Harold searched her earnest face he realized, with a leaden feeling in his stomach, that he had gotten it all wrong.

"The Machine didn't tell you to do this," he said, again not really needing the confirmation.

What he didn't expect was the slight hint of shame in Root's voice as she admitted it: "She told me _not_ to."

Harold dropped his gaze, trying to cope with this new information. It had been bad enough, thinking that the Machine and Root were working together to save his life at the cost of Beth's. But this was worse: Root was off leash. She understood that what she was doing was wrong, that even the entity she termed her "god" refused to sanction it, and yet, in her mind, it was the lesser of two evils.

"I-I thought I could sacrifice everyone," she stammered. "I really did."

Lost in his turbulent thoughts, he couldn't speak, couldn't even bring himself to look at her.

"But it turns out I can't lose _you_ , Harold. Not you _and_ Shaw."

"So you will kill this woman to save my life?" Harold managed, feeling as if the floor was falling out from under him. Root was running her own game, one of equal desperation - Harold desperate to save Beth, Root to save Harold because she hadn't been able to save Shaw. Caught up in emotions too deep to be examined, she had set herself upon the only path she could see to escape the fate she found unbearable: Harold's death.

His friend stepped forward, inexorable. "It will all be over soon."

Edging backwards along the bed, Harold felt his blood run cold: There was nowhere left to run.

When Root reached for him, he caught her hands. Even that close, the scent of the chemicals - like oranges, but weirdly off - was making him dizzy. He didn't expect to win this on physical strength, but if he could just get through to her, somehow-

"Don't do this," he pleaded. "Please don't do this. There has to be a- another way, a better way. You don't want to kill her."

Her eyes screwed up a little, but she wasn't stopping. "It's her life or yours, Harry. I just- I can't let you-"

"Those can't be the only options," he countered, wincing at the stretch in his back. "You think this is inevitable, but it's not. Even the Machine doesn't think-"

"You told her not to save you!" she cried, as if it were a personal betrayal. "If you hadn't given her that order, she'd be with me on this!"

It was too much, the agony of his back as he fought to keep the rag away, as she pushed him backwards over the bed in an attempt to get it closer to his face. His hands were going numb, his arms shaking; his vision starting to blur, and the sickly citrus odor just kept getting closer, stronger-

"You're good at finding flaws!" he blurted. "You can- you- find the core threat! It's not Beth. Not her - don't kill her. _Please_."

He couldn't turn his head away, and the cloth was close enough now that he couldn't see Root behind it. His consciousness was fading, his muscles giving in-

"Root - _Samantha_. Please. Just - find a… a better way."

* * *

Consciousness swam back with a headache and the sound of slow typing.

Harold didn't move - first because he was trying to piece together what had happened, and then because he wanted to delay his knowledge of the outcome. It was hardly possible that he had gotten through to Root; even now, parts of him wanted to conclude that she'd been right. He tried to avoid thinking too highly of himself, but there was only a handful of people still fighting back against the world Samaritan had created, and of that handful, he was possibly the only one with a statistically relevant chance of inventing a way to decisively end the war. Perhaps it _was_ best to save him - even if that meant Beth's life was forfeit for it.

A wave of guilt struck him hard: He'd been the one to bring Beth into this. He'd put her in the line of fire, even knowing what that could mean - and Beth, the unwitting weapons courier, had no idea that she was even in danger.

In wars like this, there were casualties; he knew that. But if Beth died, it would be his fault two times over: First, for failing to stop Samaritan, and then for recruiting Beth without letting her know what the mission was or even that a conflict existed. But he knew too well what the alternative was: Giving information to the wrong people, and killing the whole operation before it could get underway. When there were no right answers, you took chances, because chances were all you had.

Harold was awake enough now to grasp that he was on a bed, arms spread wide; the zip-ties held his wrists snugly, biting in only a little. The pillows were welcome, piled up carefully to keep his neck at a good angle; the small of his back was supported too, on something thin and bunchy, maybe a sheet or pillowcase.

From across the room, Root was making little noises, like she couldn't make up her mind. Harold opened his eyes and saw her at her laptop, reading through some document and making small corrections here and there. What in the world might she be typing up at this point?

"Suicide note?" he asked, surprised that his tone was more blank than bitter.

Root sighed. "Relationship suicide, I suppose. I had to make it clear why you wouldn't be there tonight, and why she shouldn't expect you to come by anymore."

A sudden, bittersweet hope filled his lungs. She was talking about Beth. Wasn't she? Was there anyone else she'd say that about? His breath came faster.

"I suppose you should hear it, before I send it off," Root said. "I tried to match diction with your previous emails. Let's see here…."

 _A few years ago, I lost someone very close to me. When I met you in Hong Kong, I thought perhaps I was ready to move on. Last night I realized that I was… mistaken. You are such an enchanting woman, and, despite our disagreements, I would have enjoyed getting to know you better, but it is more painful than I can handle at the moment. I hope you can understand._  
 _-Harold_

The words hung in the air between them, at once offering the release of a great fear and the slow, ponderous closing of a door too heavy to be opened again. Harold swallowed heavily, breath shaky, and watched the room blur as tears began to pool in his eyes.

"That's sent, then," Root said. "You're done with Beth. You'll never see her again; you understand that, right, Harold? If I thought-"

"No," Harold said dully. "I'll never see her again." The tears trickled down along his cheeks at a slant. "Thank you," he added, "for finding a better way."


End file.
